Welcome to the JavaRanch, J!
This is my morning to nag people. In
JSF,
you do not write the Controller. JSF provides the controllers for you. A backing bean is a
Model.
The reason why your action expression isn't doing what you expect is that actions definitions and bean properties in the View are not executable code, they are EL
references to attributes of a backing bean(s). So they shouldn't have parentheses, much less parameters.
JSF is based on Inversion of Control. The IoC way of getting one bean connected to another is to define it via a Managed Property, either in faces-config.xml or using the JSF2 ManagedProperty annotation. If you do that, JSF will automatically instantiate the referenced bean (if it doesn't already exist), and plug it into the target bean using the managed property's "set" method.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.